General Music Chat

same with Zydeco. Clifton Lanier may have been the innovator...but he did that mostly in Beaumont.

No Ted, it's Clifton CHENIER. He was Creole, not Anglo. He came from the Cajun country between Opelousas and Lafayette. The region stretching SW toward Lake Charles is where the Cajuns settled so it's just a hop and a skip to Beaumont. Chenier played mainly from Houston to New Orleans and all points in between but mostly in the Lafayette area.

Like all musicians, he played where he could get gigs. He traveled in a van and pulled a very small trailer w/ the bands equipment so it had to be within easy driving distance for him.

Oh yea...Chanier, not Lanier...the 70s was a long time ago. Why do you think I don't know he was creole? I said nothing about his race.

From 77-80 my band had a house gig across the road from the Little Brown Jug on College in Beaumont and Clifton had that house gig for (it seems like?) about a decade. I had no idea then that this music was unknown outside of this area.

Beaumont had the Big Bopper, George Jones, Johnny & Edgar Winter, and also produced the greatest female singer of all time. If you don't know who that is, just try to remember who every great female singer gets compared to (*but none have ever touched)

And as you know, Gatemouth was lead guitar for Freddy King, who I would credit as the greatest bluesman of all time.

Ted-

Please take 20 minutes out of your day and watch this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bFzS6upIW4

And please take this into consideration. These players improvise for 3, maybe 4 hours on one theme. 95% of a raga is improvised. I have no idea as to your improvisational skills but I can relay my experience in the craft of improvisation because I helped put together an improvisational band back around the Millennium that lasted for a couple of years.

We could improvise for about 25-30 minutes max. on one theme. We were all very experienced players and fed off each other but the mental and physical concentration was exhausting after this amount of time. It takes many years to build up the stamina and experience to pull this off correctly. I couldn't imagine the difficulty it takes to pull this off. I couldn't do it if I dropped everything I am currently doing and practice for the remainder of my life. These players play ALL day EVERY day for many years to learn this. That's all they do. They don't mow the lawn or wash the dishes or go to other jobs. They play sitar.

Same thing could be said for the Romas and their guitar players. They start at a very young age and devote their entire time to practice. That's why I don't all fired up about playing Gypsy jazz solos. Comping is not a problem. Playing solos definitely requires a great amount of skill and determination and can only be learned by practicing for years (unless you are a phenom, which I am not). I know my limits and try to play the best I can within those limits. I find I get better with age but that can only be attributed to playing more often (because I rarely practice).

Man, if someone can't improvise then they are not a player. Period.

Yes, that's pretty much what everyone in Texas does...duh? Had one guy in the 80s that would play a solo until I made him stop in every song. We did a 45 minute version of "Them Changes" for example. We made "Down By The River" and "Sunshine of Your Love" last at least a half hour.

Yes, he can wank all day every day....and I was right with him in every song, either on bass or backing him as second lead if we had a bass player that month.

Rob, like every guitar player who is any good, uses all of his fingers (at the same time!) and plays in a different key from song to song....and he was pretty good about getting several notes out of one bend, now that I think about it.

I seriously don't know why you guys think that can't be replicated. I assume that you have the ability to listen and figure out how to play a cover song when you want to? What is the difference here?

Are you butt-hurt about that?

Please spare us your homo- erotic fantasies Yod.

If you aren't then you would have no reason to mischaracterize what I said. In this latest video, she is moving much faster than the previous one, but still not super-human speed so it's not impossible to follow.

I didn't mischaracterize what you said, I copy and pasted it.

Yep....it might take a couple of weeks to learn how to get four notes out of one bend...but ANY guitar professional guitarist could learn that technique and get a reasonable facsimile with enough time & practice. I estimate it would take about two weeks of concentrated practice for me to play a credible version of the slow jam you presented.

Credible to whom? Certainly not to anyone familiar with the instrument and music.
Yod, is a legend in his own mind! Obviously!

Are you saying that one must be Indian to do it? I'm saying that one needs only to commit to it, and your race shouldn't matter.

Having another comprehension problem Yod?
Superhuman? Race?
That is just you babbling.
Are you trying to mischaracterize what I said?
I said I did not believe your claim that:

" .... there is nothing she is doing that I couldn't do with a couple of weeks practice on that instrument, and I'm no Jimmy Page. It's just droning in a single key with a bunch of (really cool) string bends. "

I know you are too busy too prove the claims that you blow out of your ass,
so let's consider the case of Jimmy Page.
You admit that he is a more capable guitarist than you are.

So jimmy Page was so into sitar and Indian music he went to India and got himself a sitar .. that was 50 years ago.
Can he play it yet? Apparently not.
He seems to be a humble and modest fellow, but certainly not shy about displaying his talents.

So you are saying YOU can learn to play like Mita Nag (a concert level performer of sitar) in two weeks, though it is apparent
that Jimmy Page cannot, even though he has had a sitar for 50 years. George Harrison's demo of sitar shows that
he was not even anywhere close to being able to "imitate Nag". Ravi probably would do a fine job of it.

As for reducing Indian music and sitar to just bending one note on one string with a standard strum pattern.
Ok, let's turn that around ...
Sure I can hit the harmonics at the 12th and 7th frets, noodle around in DADGAD and bend the F on the low D string up to G occasionally
... so now I can say that I can do anything Jimmy Page does on Black Mountain Side. .. gee that was so easy!!
No problem, and it did not even take me two weeks to learn it.

Tod,
Most importantly, when playing the sitar, don't forget to wear the lemon juice!


bottom line ....

I made an obviously exaggerated statement (1000 times better) to indicate that I was expressing an opinion.

If I had said "3.5 times better" then I can see how you might take that as a statement to be taken literally,
and that you could demand an accounting for.
But "1000 times better" is obviously an opinion.

YOUR counter to that was to make boast about your abilities, claiming you could do anything a concert level performer of Indian classical music can do on the sitar, with two weeks of practice.
"there is nothing she is doing that I couldn't do with a couple of weeks practice on that instrument"

Nag has studied with masters of the sitar since she was 6 years old, so that is quite a boast you make for yourself. You have assured us that this is no exaggeration of your ability, and even ask that we pay you for it.

OK you prove a few things with this post:

1. You ARE still butt-hurt that someone dared call you on your wildly exaggerated claim. Aw....I tho thowwy.


2. You are still attempting to mischaracterize what I've said, and have never talked to anyone but that straw man. So....look over here....I'll spell it out for you one more time.


"I could play that song (which you posted) with enough time and practice, guesstimating it "could" take up to a couple of weeks to figure out, learn the one bending technique I don't already know, and memorize it well enough to pull it off.

I don't have to prove that to you, just because you may not think that you can...but there is nothing super-human in that song you posted. Slow, open tuning, one finger...yada yada.

Again...I'm still ready to prove it if you want to pay for my time. I've got decades of proving that i can imitate what other people play if I want to.

And I made about $1,600 today. I can give you a few mid-week days cheaper, if you want to stretch out your payments.

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[

[i]The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is.]

....said the amateur to the professional.


Dude...I've been proving it since 1977 every night. Who are you again?

What's all this BULLSHIIT joseph?
Sorry to play the keyboard warrior game again...

BOTTOM LINE!!!! YOD/TED is one of the greatest musicians you could ever hope to even meet! TED is also an amazing businessman. He was also right about Ted Cruz. He is also right about his care and concern of all people. He loves his family and he is just as much a great American as I could testify.

So who the fuuck are you joseph?

Go home little boy!

JIMMY PAGE... AWESOME!

We did a 45 minute version of "Them Changes" for example. We made "Down By The River" and "Sunshine of Your Love" last at least a half hour.

Ted-

That is not improvisation. I'm talking about spontaneously composing a song from NOTHING,
not wanking over a chord change for an hour. Anyone can do that.

Improvisation - the art or act of improvising, or of composing, uttering, executing, or arranging anything without previous preparation

You get three guys together, start playing ANYTHING (not the head of a written song). Jazz, Blues, Rock whatever.............Now, concentrate and play off each other changing keys, time signatures, progressions, dynamics, rhythms........try to do THAT for 45 minutes w/o any cues, gestures, banter......nothing......... and create a genuine song w/o mistakes around a common theme.

Cream could do this for about 20 minutes and then they would call it quits and this was including the head and ending (which was written). They took the tonic of the head and improvised freely creating something totally different before they came back to the head to end the song. The heads were usually short (as well as the endings) so they probably put in a good 15-18 minutes of improvisation out there. They ran out of gas and called it quits before starting the next song (which usually wasn't improvised.)

Anyway, you just answered my question. No need to take this any further.

Why do you assume to know what we did or didn't do?

Yes, in the rock guitar world of yesteryear we may have started with a common structure when we played publicly in the scenario mentioned...but then the song went through changes that were not pre-planned and we did this all night every night. But we also did a lot of spontaneous jamming with no pre-determined structure. Doesn't every player worth his salt do that? There must a dozen sites around Dallas where musicians meet for the first time and do that on a daily basis.

l mentioned that example only because we had been discussing rock guitar (ala Page) and that was the most applicable to the discussion. What you are describing (no common structure to start with) is known as "prophetic worship" in my circles today.

Yes, I love to do that when there is a band who is capable of flowing. In one recent Korean church I jammed with, we went 2 and half hours playing a single song that never stopped. Wrote lyrics, chord changes, rhythm and tempo changes, etc as it went. Started at 7 PM on a Satuday night and it was 9:30 before the song stopped. We could have gone all night if the church stayed open.

If you go to Succat Hillel in Jerusalem, you'll see international groups doing that non-stop 24/7/365. Some of them are great and some of them are not.

But again.....why do you think that is so hard to imitate? It is not.

If you ever want to make a road trip w/ the family just to get away for a long day, take a drive down to Port Arthur and cross the Sabine River and stay on Hwy. 82 until you get to Holly Beach, then take Hwy. 27 to the Calcasieu Ship channel and take the ferry across (good time to stretch your legs). Stay on 27 until you hit Creole and jump back on 82 (this is where it gets very scenic). Just after you cross the Intracoastal Waterway you head due North on Hwy. 35 and end up in Rayne on I-10. You're now 55 miles East of Lake Charles. That part of the world is very scenic and isolated so have plenty of gas when you hit Creole. I don't think there is a place on this planet quite like that country. Very beautiful but isolated

Did you forget I'm from Vidor TX? Haven't been through there since I was little, but we made that drive sometimes from Winni or Crystal Beach to visit relatives in Lake Charles a few times. Did you ever visit the alligator swamps there? They are stacked higher there than anyplace in the northern west hemisphere, including the Everglades. We didn't go east of Lake Charles back then, but I play in a few churches down in Houma area so I've got through there in the last few years. Yes, it's scenic...but when you grow up around that it's not a big deal. Didn't even see a mountain until I was 30 but that's what I prefer nowadays.

And btw, Clifton Howeveryouspellhisname bored me to tears in the 70s, so why would I learn how to pronounce or spell his name? Didn't say I was big fan, just that they were the band playing across the street when I was a teenager. Though I did like the way an electric accordian sounded blaring through amps across a highway, it was still "Old folks" music to me.... only started to appreciate Zydeco as "world music" recently.



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Hmmm ... mulling over ideas for a situation comedy about a guy from Texas who fulfills the stereotype of the crude, arrogant American traveling about the world.

In this episode he bets a guy in a bar that he can play as well as famous sitarist.
When presented with the opportunity to show his stuff, and not even being able to even play one convincing meend,
makes a huge fool of himself to the amusement of the crowd.
Even funnier when he remains convinced that he is the true winner because he considers the Indians as just primitive savages incapable of forming a major triad.
He has one enthusiastic fan however who, because he wears a pig mask over his head, is mistaken for a pig headed god. That helps the Texan land a gig performing Indian Classical music at a small arts colony in Mexico.

Ya know...you have been trying to make this personal since the beginning and I've tried to take the high road of sticking to the issue of objectively comparing talent and impact between a woman you showed playing a slow song that is easily imitated (if you know how to learn a cover song) vs one of the recognized greatest in modern music history.

But instead of just admitting you were exaggerating until I beat that ridiculous assertion down for four pages, you feel the need to lash out and diminish me personally, though you have NO IDEA what I'm capable of.



Proving you live in a fantasy world of your own design. Totally ignorant.

Not worth talking to anymore either. You can have the last word, now go prove me right once more.



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